‘Terminator 5’ Moves Back a Week; Will ‘Independence Day 2’ Change Release Dates?

Everybody’s jostling to get a decent position in Summer 2015, which truly is shaping up to be the biggest movie season in recent memory (if not ever) – with Batman vs. Superman (a.k.a. Man of Steel 2), The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Jurassic World (a.k.a. Jurassic Park IV), the Terminator movie franchise reboot (a.k.a. Terminator 5) and Independence Day 2 (which may end up being titled ID Forever) being the blockbuster sequels with official release dates… so far.

The fifth Terminator installment has been developing in its current form going back almost three years, ever since Annapurna Pictures head Megan Ellison (Zero Dark Thirty) purchased the rights to produce Terminator movies until 2019 (when the series rights will revert back to creator James Cameron). A pair of screenwriters were attached near the beginning of this year, while Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) was announced as the director just two weeks ago – with filming slated to get underway sometime in the first quarter of 2014.

Paramount had originally scheduled Terminator 5 (note: that’s not the official title) – a reboot that will kickoff a new stand-alone trilogy – to be released in theaters on the last Friday in June 2015, which would’ve given the movie a week’s head-start on the Independence Day sequel. The studio has since bumped director Alan Taylor’s Terminator installment back a week to July 1st, so that the movie is now positioned to compete directly with Roland Emmerich’s second helping of alien invasion spectacle – but will that change in the foreseeable future?

Terminator (2015) will bring the 66-year old Arnold Schwarzenegger back to his iconic sci-fi role (despite his age, it seems), while there are rumors that fresher acting blood like Dwayne Johnson might be playing another breed of mechanized killing machine programmed by Skynet in the film. The Terminator franchise’s box office muscle has diminished since its peak going all the way back to Terminator 2: Judgement Day (which took in $520 million worldwide in 1991), but even so many years having passed and weak reviews didn’t prevent Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Terminator Salvation (2009) from taking in $433 million and $371 million worldwide, respectively.

Independence Day 2, by comparison, has nostalgia for the original movie on its side, yet the sheer amount of time that’s passed since Emmerich’s first installment – coupled with the writer/director’s revelation that there will be returning cast members – but that may not be enough to instill confidence that the sequel can walk away unbruised in a showdown with the new Terminator over the 2015 Fourth of July holiday session. Moreover, Emmerich recently claimed that he doesn’t think the ID4 sequel will be ready until 2016 (i.e. the first movie’s 20th anniversary), so it seems all the more possible now that an official release date change could be right around the corner…

Do you think 20th Century Fox will push the Independence Day sequel all the way back to Summer 2016, where Disney recently moved Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales? Or will they decide to take the chance and go head-to-head with the Terminator (2015) reboot?

Terminator 5 will open in theaters on July 1st, 2015.

Independence Day 2 is currently scheduled to open in theaters on July 3rd, 2015.